The Fargo Forum And Daily Republican

Baron De Malaussene, French nobleman and former adjutant in the French army, twice wounded and decorated with the Croix de Guerre by General Joffre, writing to friends in Fargo from Portal, N. D., pictures in words the unpreparedness of the French at the beginning of the war.

The baron explains how French troops fired blank cartridges to make a noise and depended upon the bayonet to repel the Germans, this being the state of affairs in the early days of the war.

He touches lightly on the ghastly horrors to be witnessed on the battlefields and in the trenches. He tells of the intense bombardments in which sometimes men stood up to their breasts in water and fought for days without relief until hundreds of men were so exhausted that they rolled into the mud and were drowned.

He states that the intensity of some of the bombardments was beyond description, the Germans firing 10 to 15 shots per second to every yard. He reports seeing men's hair turn grey in a second owing to the concussion.

"When the men charge they are drunk with excitement and have only one thought in their minds to get at the enemy," he writes.

He says it is not safe to trust the Germans when they surrender and gives an experience of his own, where a German officer had held up his hands in one of which was a revolver, calling out, "I surrender comrade."

The baron lowered his rifle whereupon a shot whizzed by his ear from the officer's revolver. "He missed me," writes the baron, "but I didn't miss him. After that there was no more 'comrade' for me."

"You must be a fatalist to live through some of these things," he writes. I have known some men to go through terrible battles practically unscathed and then to go home and be run over by an automobile or killed in some accident.

"Quite a number of people have asked me when I think the war will end. I think, as things go now, that it will end this year. We had the kaiser on his knees at the Marne, but did not have the material to complete the victory."